Tag Archives: py3Dmol

How to interact with small molecules in Jupyter Notebooks

The combination of Python and the cheminformatics toolkit RDKit has opened up so many ways to explore chemistry on a computer. Jupyter — named for the three languages, Julia, Python, and R — ties interactivity and visualization together, creating wonderful environments (Notebooks and JupyterLab) to carry out, share and reproduce research, including:

“data cleaning and transformation, numerical simulation, statistical modeling, data visualization, machine learning, and much more.”

—https://jupyter.org

At this year’s annual RDKit UGM (User Group Meeting), Cédric Bouysset shared a tutorial explaining how to create a grid of molecules that you can interact with, using his “mols2grid“:

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Viewing 3D molecules interactively in Jupyter iPython notebooks

Greg Landrum, curator of the invaluable open source cheminformatics API, RDKit, recently blogged about viewing molecules in a 3D window within a Jupyter-hosted iPython notebook (as long as your browser supports WebGL, that is).

The trick is to use py3Dmol. It’s easy to install:

pip install py3Dmol

This is built on the object-oriented, webGL based JavaScript library for online molecular visualization 3Dmol.js (Rego & Koes, 2015); here's a nice summary of the capabilities of 3Dmol.js. It's features include:

  • support for pdb, sdf, mol2, xyz, and cube formats
  • parallelized molecular surface computation
  • sphere, stick, line, cross, cartoon, and surface styles
  • atom property based selection and styling
  • labels
  • clickable interactivity with molecular data
  • geometric shapes including spheres and arrows

I tried a simple example and it worked beautifully:

import py3Dmol
view = py3Dmol.view(query='pdb:1hvr')
view.setStyle({'cartoon':{'color':'spectrum'}})
view

py3dmol_in_jupyter_ipython

The 3Dmol.js website summarizes how to view molecules, along with how to choose representations, how to embed it, and even how to develop with it.

References

Nicholas Rego & David Koes (2015). “3Dmol.js: molecular visualization with WebGL”.
Bioinformatics, 31 (8): 1322-1324. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btu829